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Category: Psychology

Learning the wrong lesson from Elon Musk’s business success

Learning the wrong lesson from Elon Musk’s business success

Adam Grant writes: Last December, I asked my students at Wharton to nominate and vote on topics for our final class. The runaway top choice was leadership lessons from Elon Musk. It’s become a hot topic among the corporate elite, too. At a recent leadership conference, the founder of a lucrative start-up said in passing that Mr. Musk was making dictators cool again. The chief executive of a large company said Mr. Musk was giving people like him their power…

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Trump’s drive to dominate can neither be satisfied nor appeased

Trump’s drive to dominate can neither be satisfied nor appeased

Jamelle Bouie writes: The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals…

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We see the world suffused with causality

We see the world suffused with causality

Mariel Goddu writes: Causal understanding is the cognitive capacity that enables you to think about how things affect and influence each other. It is your concept of making, doing, generating and producing – of causing – that allows you to grasp how the Moon causes the tides, how a virus makes you sick, why tariffs change international trade, the social consequences of a faux pas, and the way each event in a story leads to what happens next. Causal understanding is the foundation of all thoughts why, how, because, and what if….

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Humility reduces anger and promotes more benign interpretations of conflict

Humility reduces anger and promotes more benign interpretations of conflict

PsyPost reports: Research published in Personality and Individual Differences suggests that humility—both as a trait and as an experimentally induced state—was associated with lower levels of anger and reduced hostile attributions in ambiguous social situations. Anger can be a destructive and difficult-to-regulate emotion, often linked to interpersonal and societal conflicts. Existing research suggests that humility—a psychological construct characterized by openness, accurate self-assessment, low self-focus, and appreciation of others—might serve as a protective factor against anger and aggression. Eddie Harmon-Jones and…

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Increased AI use linked to eroding critical thinking skills

Increased AI use linked to eroding critical thinking skills

Phys.org reports: A study by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School has found that increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities. It points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline. AI’s influence is growing fast. A quick search of AI-related science stories reveals how fundamental a tool it has become. Thousands of AI-assisted, AI-supported and AI-driven analyses and decision-making tools help scientists improve their research. AI has also become…

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Americans are now spending more time alone than ever

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever

Derek Thompson writes: Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more…

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Our morals change with the seasons

Our morals change with the seasons

Alice Sun writes: The seasons have been shown to influence many elements of our psyches and behavior: mood, color preferences, how charitable we are, even cognitive performance. But recently, researchers found they may also affect what we tend to consider among our most profoundly held convictions: how we decide what is right and wrong. A team of researchers looked at a decade’s worth of responses to an online survey about morals and analyzed how these responses changed from one season…

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The AI world is undermining our confidence in human thinking and judgment

The AI world is undermining our confidence in human thinking and judgment

Philip Ball writes: Reading The AI Mirror I was struck by [Shannon] Vallor’s determination to probe more deeply than the usual litany of concerns about AI: privacy, misinformation, and so forth. Her book is really a discourse on the relation of human and machine, raising the alarm on how the tech industry propagates a debased version of what we are, one that reimagines the human in the guise of a soft, wet computer. If that sounds dour, Vallor most certainly…

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How social media is reshaping human connection

How social media is reshaping human connection

Giuseppe Riva writes: In response to this pressing need for greater insight into social media, researchers have proposed a novel Disembodied Disconnect Hypothesis. Introduced in a recent paper by different European and American researchers coordinated by the Humane Technology Lab, at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart, this framework examines how digital platforms reshape social behaviours without necessarily altering cognitive structures. The hypothesis posits that while digital platforms create new opportunities for interaction, they fundamentally differ from traditional, in-person social…

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Researchers are trying to ‘inoculate’ people against misinformation

Researchers are trying to ‘inoculate’ people against misinformation

Science reports: As a young boy growing up in the Netherlands in the 1990s, Sander van der Linden learned that most of his mother’s relatives, who were Jewish, had been killed by the Nazis, in the grip of racist ideology. At school, he was confronted with antisemitic conspiracy theories still circulating in Europe. It all got him wondering about the power of propaganda and how people become convinced of falsehoods. Eventually, he would make studying those issues his career. As…

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Kama muta: the powerful emotion you didn’t know how to name

Kama muta: the powerful emotion you didn’t know how to name

David Robson writes: I am about 20 minutes into my conversation with the psychological anthropologist Alan Fiske when he starts talking about a lost kitten. “If you saw it outside, you would go pick it up and stop it getting run over by a truck, check if it’s hungry, and make sure it’s warm and safe,” he says. “Your heart goes out to it.” I’m not an ardent cat lover, and I don’t consider myself to be an especially soppy…

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Relying on AI could reshape your entire identity without you realizing

Relying on AI could reshape your entire identity without you realizing

Muriel Leuenberger writes: Your phone and its apps know a lot about you. Who you are talking to and spending time with, where you go, what music, games, and movies you like, how you look, which news articles you read, who you find attractive, what you buy with your credit card, and how many steps you take. This information is already being exploited to sell us products, services, or politicians. Online traces allow companies like Google or Facebook to infer…

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New research on political animosity reveals an ‘ominous’ trend

New research on political animosity reveals an ‘ominous’ trend

PsyPost reports: Usually, political tensions in the United States intensify as elections approach but return to pre-election levels once the elections pass. However, a new analysis of tens of thousands of interviews revealed that this did not happen after the 2022 elections. Individuals with more exposure to the campaign tended to be more polarized, and this sentiment endured after the elections. This trend held true for partisans on both sides of the political spectrum. The study, published in Science Advances,…

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Navigation strategies studied in a lab may not replicate in real life

Navigation strategies studied in a lab may not replicate in real life

Sujata Gupta writes: On a trip to Siberia in 2019, cognitive scientist Pablo Fernandez Velasco attended a raffle drawing with the region’s Evenki reindeer herders. Prizes included a soccer ball, tea, a portable radio, a GPS unit and other knickknacks. A herder in Velasco’s group won the GPS. “I thought [that] was one of the fancier prizes,” says Velasco, of the University of York in England. “He was crestfallen.” The herder, who had been eyeing the radio, had no use…

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Deny, attack, reverse – Trump has perfected the art of inverted victimhood

Deny, attack, reverse – Trump has perfected the art of inverted victimhood

Early this year (but just as applicable now as then) Sidney Blumenthal wrote: Time after time, with predictable regularity, never missing a beat, Donald Trump proclaims his innocence. He always denies that he has done anything wrong. The charge does not matter. He is blameless. But this is only the beginning of the pattern. Then, he attacks his accusers, or anyone involved in bringing him to account, usually of committing the identical offense of which he stands accused. But it…

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Mary Trump says Uncle Donald suffered ‘narcissistic injury’ in debate and won’t recover

Mary Trump says Uncle Donald suffered ‘narcissistic injury’ in debate and won’t recover

HuffPost reports: Mary Trump on Wednesday praised Vice President Kamala Harris for inflicting what she described as a “narcissistic injury” on her uncle, Donald Trump, during the opening minutes of Tuesday’s presidential debate. Democratic nominee Harris’ way of getting under her Republican opponent’s skin just made him “unravel,” the former president’s niece told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “He couldn’t recover and, honestly, he’s not going to,” she added. Harris “so brilliantly” gave both “substantive answers to questions to help the American…

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